Ubersoft.net now live on Drupal 5.1

It's alive! http://ubersoft.net

It took about three months, but it's finally up and running. My brain is fried, but it's finally up and running. Every once and a while I twitch uncontrollably... but it's finally up and running.

And worth it, I think. It was worth the trouble it took to get done.

A little background:

I publish a webcomic called Help Desk. I've been doing it since 1996, and for most of that time it was all static pages. When I joined Keenspot (a webcomics collective) in 2000 I added some templating tools they developed that allowed the static pages to be built automatically every night, but it was still not a particularly dynamic system, and I always thought that was a shame. I'd always wanted the site to be sort of like Slashdot -- post a comic and let people comment on it if they wanted to.

I first tried to implement such a system by using WordPress -- I did this in early 2006, and it worked OK but there were limitations. I have nothing bad to say about WordPress, it's great at what it does and its extremely easy to use and theme, but to get it to do some of the things I wanted it to do I was really pushing it to the limit. So in late 2006 I started looking at Drupal 5, and in late December I actually started building the new site. It's live now, and while only time will tell if it will actually do what I want, I have to say I'm really impressed with what Drupal let me do.

In the process of building the site, and specifically building the site archives for my webcomics (I have 3), I have really become a fan of Drupal's taxonomy system. I use it a lot -- not only do my comics have a "default" category that identifies which of the three comics they are, but there are also categories that list all the characters that appear in each comic and the name of story arcs that occur within each comic. This allows me to tag each comic as I create it, and when someone views each node they see links for the story arc and for each character that appears in a given episode. By clicking on the story arc link they can view the entire series of comics that appear in that story arc, and by clicking on a character name they can view only the comics where that character appears.

The other key ingredient of my setup is Eaton's Custom Pagers module -- the standard Drupal pager works contrary to the standard paging method for webcomics (left for previous, right for next), and Custom Pagers fixes that quite handily. Such a "small" thing, but my site would fall apart without it.

Finally I use views for just about everything -- the front page, the comic archives, character lists, almost everything except browsing one comic at a time is a view. Views actually allows me to frontload my comics (i.e., publish them ahead of schedule and have them display at a specific predetermined date) because you can set the filters to exclude any content that was published on a date that hasn't occured yet. And the views bookmark module gave my readers a feature they've wanted for a while: the ability to bookmark individual comics as they're going through my archives.

It's a home-grown theme, and it's not what I'd call a "pretty" or "elegant" design, but it works for what I want it to do. Some day I'd like to make it more xhtml compliant (Impossible at this point, since the Keenspot branding elements were created back when html 3 ruled the day, so they are chock full of invalid tags).

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit too much, but I really am impressed with how Drupal was able to handle all the tasks I wanted it to do. It was a struggle, but worth doing.